Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Review

Finished. idk. Anarchism is still super stupid, and as flawed as the anarchist society in the book is, it’s still very idealized. There should be way more violence and chaos.

The dark side of human nature is still present in the book, but with far less intensity than in real life. Only when people really are starving for days would they start having violent thoughts. And bullying and conflicts only exist in a verbal form. Why? It’s either that they are genetically more domicile than real-life humans, or their non-violent anarchist education is very thorough. But it’s not like they only have 1000 people or something, there are 20 million people, and the spawn rate of an evil death lord must be over $2\times10^{-5}$ even with strong brainwashing right? If not, then let’s do a little math.

We know it’s been 200 years since they left the main planet, and they now have around 20M people. Assuming they start with 1M people, and that the population growth is linear (which is very unlikely but whatever). With a very generous assumption of 10 deaths per 1000 people per year, the total number of deaths would be

$$\sum_{i=1}^{200}\dfrac{20M}{200}i\times\dfrac{10}{1000}=20.1M$$

(TODO: add latex rendering)

over the course of 200 years. So the total number of people ever existing on the planet is about 40M. If the death rate is 20 deaths per 1000 (which is still a low number considering how primitive the society is), then the number would be 60M. Surely there will be multiple Hitlers, Stalins or Maos out of all these people? They only need one to break this super fragile peaceful anarchist society where everyone is like a sheep.

I do think it’s possible that this kind of system has some sort of mechanism to isolate or destroy those residing at p-value < 0.001%. I feel like the mechanism in Brave New World, moving the queers (kind of cute to address Hitler as a queer) to Greenland semi-forcibly, does have the potential to integrate with the dispossessed word, but the author didn’t try to come up with anything like that. Pretty lazy imo. When you’re designing a system, you should think about what equilibrium you want to achieve and what constraints to add to direct the Nash to that equilibrium, apparently Ursula Le Guin is too above these trivial things to work on them.

7.5/10

About science fiction

I think Ursula Le Guin is able to propose a unique and interesting world, but not a strong plot or the corresponding mechanisms to drive it. I think it’s just her style. She likes to leave everything dry, soft, and loose, like 老子, but that’s not what I’m seeking in a science fiction book.

The book is hardly a science fiction novel tho. I assume her relativity and quantum entanglement thing which she barely described has something to do with the moral of the story? But I really can’t see how are those things related to anarchism. They’re completely unnecessary imo. I think she didn’t even have or want to apply the energy needed to write a compelling science fiction novel.

This book doesn’t have the beautiful prose of The Left Hand of Darkness btw, not that I care.

I do think the world-building is better than that of The Left Hand of Darkness. She did try to thoroughly explain how her anarchist society works in terms of everything, whereas in The Left Hand of Darkness, I’m not sure if the genderless society is explored to the greatest extent.

I think Ursula Le Guin is just an “idea” gal. She can come up with interesting ideas, but her execution is often bad, or may I say plain to be more accurate, whether intentional or not. Her books would be much better had she left her ideas to be explored by Chinese sci-fi writers.

I specified Chinese because I have yet to read a great sci-fi from a Western sci-fi writer, which is bizarre. I feel like Western sci-fi writers often just create some settings that may or may not be interesting and leave them as they are, without really diving deep into those ideas. They would be rejected right away in an Amazon interview settings. Well tbf you have Neal Stephensen who dives way too deeeep, filling his books with trivial math calculations that no one cares.

I’m currently eyeing Children of Time to be the one.

Quotes

“Hell!” he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the reigion of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay toll we’re reposted."

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy.

An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t break a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people.

He was a man released from jail, going home to his family. Whatever such a man sees along his way he seems only as reflections of the light.

Reading log

At the start, it was a pretty easy read. No convoluted indirect obscure subtle wordings as in The Left Hand of Darkness. In the middle of the book, however, the subtleness and indirect prose was finally back. No more speed reading. Some parts are even as obscure as The Book of the New Sun. There are more layers in the prose, and you may need to read a couple of times to understand what she means, as it contains what she was trying to convey.